Читать книгу Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust - John-Paul Himka - Страница 17

As already explained in the previous chapter, documents emanating from various offices and military units of the Third Reich have enjoyed primacy in Holocaust studies since the early 1960s. Though an undue reliance on them had a distorting influence on the field, they are nonetheless indispensable, since it was nationalist socialist Germany that initiated and bore most responsibility for the genocide of the Jewish people. Also, the Germans documented their murderous activities in great detail. They felt they were undertaking, to use a Hegelian phrase, a deed of world-historical significance. They employed euphemisms, such as “Final Solution,” “special handling,” and “resettlement,” but they wrote clearly enough about the plans and progress of their project to destroy what they considered to be “the Jewish race.” They left a huge legacy of frank documentation, probably the most voluminous and transparent record of any genocidal operation in world history.

Particularly valuable for our purposes are reports from the Eastern front. Immediately after the invasion of the USSR, Nazi mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, began to issue reports to the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) on their activities.17 The first report, which was dated 23 June 1941, bore the title Sammelmeldung “UdSSR,” no. 1; but no. 2, which had the same date, was renamed Ereignismeldungen UdSSR (EM). Altogether 195 EMs were prepared, the last of which was dated 27 February 1942. Another set of similar reports was also submitted to the RSHA by the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) and the Security Service (SD) in the occupied Soviet territories. These Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten began to appear on 5 January 1942; fifty-five were submitted, the last of which was dated 23 May 1943.18 These reports, in addition to documenting the progress of the Holocaust across Ukraine, also provided copious information on the activities of the Bandera movement.

The records of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in Lviv have been especially useful, since they document the participation of the Ukrainian police in the major actions that destroyed the city’s Jewish population. There is a related, but rather scanty set of records on the militia that existed prior to the formation of the auxiliary police force. Both sets of records are housed in the State Archives of Lviv Oblast in Lviv19 but are difficult to access there; in spring 2011, a research assistant for this monograph was denied access to both sets of records.20 Fortunately, the most important police records, selected by Dieter Pohl, were microfilmed by USHMM,21 and the militia records were microfilmed in their entirety by the United States Office of Special Investigations; thus, I have been able to study them.22

Kai Struve made excellent use of German military records to shed light on the anti-Jewish violence in Galicia in summer 1941. In this monograph I rely extensively on his research in these records, although I occasionally cite original documents. I also make occasional use of the records of German trials of Nazi war criminals, again relying more on Struve’s research.

As was mentioned in the previous chapter, German documentation tended to emphasize the successes of the Reich’s policies in the occupied Soviet Union and thus understated such irritating phenomena as Jewish resistance and non-Jewish aid to Jews, especially in survey reports like the EMs and Meldungen.

It is important to be aware that all the German documentation from the national socialist era reflects events through a highly racialized, ruthlessly imperialist prism. Many of the German documents incorporate the mindset of mass murderers and have to be used with care; the documents themselves exclude the perspectives of victims, but historians using them should keep those victims in mind.